Sunday, April 29, 2012

For a while now I've been working on a second large solo graffiti project. Like the first, I am taking advantage of the vertical dimension in order to have an impressive amount of square footage unclaimed by other street artists. Unfortunately, this means I'm doing the whole thing by ladder, which makes everything go much slower, but in addition to having a big blank wall I also hope to avoid having anyone paint over my work. Also like the first one, it is in a very public and well-traveled spot here in the center of the city, in this case right next to the Dique do Tororó, a large artificial lake I've written about before on this blog.

I'm doing a couple things differently this time: first of all, I've decided to only paint critters, or bichos as they would be called in Portuguese. Originally it was going to be another visual free-for-all but I decided to limit it this time. The other big change I decided on relates to time. I knew this project would take me several months, as I will only be able to go out maybe once a week to work on it. I realized that with my last wall, people were viewing it over time - if they passed by it, they would look for changes and new elements. Problem was, with the last one, I left a lot of things half-finished and they stayed that way sometimes for a month or more. This time, I'm painting discrete elements, critters as it were, and finishing them off each session so nothing will appear unfinished, and over time the painting evolves as new elements are introduced and interact with the existing ones. Hopefully this will make the wall more interesting for anyone who is actually paying attention to what I'm doing.

I've been chronicling my progress on Flickr, here's an overview of what I've done so far.

Prequel - I took this photo just before I started what I consider to be 'Phase I.' My original intervention was the three red monsters that I've been painting with some frequency, and the letters KUZA. I hadn't committed myself to painting the whole dern thing (it's about 70 yards long) when I painted them.

Phase I - big centipedes and blue dinosaurs. Don't tell the dudes who painted at ground level, but I sure wish it looked a bit nicer than it does.

Phase II - whale/amoeba thingies. There are a lot of underwater beasties in here, but not all of them are. These mostly travel in pods.

I also painted some terrestrial grazer-type things, which are beginning to show the overlapping effect I am ultimately after in the mural

Phase III - the first of what will hopefully be several worm/snake type things, painted on the left end of the wall. Traffic here (I was standing on the other side of the road as I took this) all goes right to left, so most of the movement in the painting will do so as well. This was going to be much more plain, but it looked too boring so I embellished it. In the middle is also a blue kamr famr, a creature I created back when I was younger than Lucas.

I plan to add several tributes into the work, here is the first: Totoro, by Hiyao Miyazaki, from one of my favorite films. Also a school of underbite fish.

Phase IV - this week I only painted in this section, trying to build up to optimum density, still needs more overlapping.

Phase V - today. This week Lucas did a little sketch and asked me if I'd add it to my mural. I said sure - I'd actually been wanting to paint something of his for some time now. Here it is in all its toothy glory.

These vines grow very quickly, and I have been ripping some of them down. I decided not to fight them in this case, and instead painted in some camouflaged lizard creatures underneath them.

And some more underbite fish, and another of these worm/balloon whatever-it-is thingies... this area is very close to having enough critters. There are still big sections with nothing on them.

That's it for now! Hope you enjoyed it. I'll post an update when I'm done.